Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt Read online

  Of course I’d heard about women who lose themselves completely, who give everything they have to a man, allowing his life to take over. It never entered my mind that I could be one of them.

  But in one walk down the aisle, I did just that. And I had no one to blame but myself. I chose it, even though I didn’t realize I was doing it.

  Isn’t that how it always seems to work? One day you wake up, look around, and wonder, Where am I? Whose life am I living, and how did I get here? Little pieces of the real you keep flitting away in someone else’s wind until the you that you’ve always known has disappeared. It happens so gradually you don’t even notice it at first. I know I didn’t.

  A few weeks after the wedding, Justin and I were watching the video of our big day, and I found myself overwhelmed with shame and sadness. I tried to hide it, but I guess my heart was on my sleeve. I can be a darn good actress when I want to be, but the fact is, if I care deeply or if I’m hurt, it shows. My new husband noticed, and he didn’t like it.

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re not happy after watching our wedding?” he snapped.

  But if you could see the tape, or if you had been at the wedding, you’d know why. It’s impossible to ignore Justin’s impatience blaring through each scene in the video—the stomping away from the altar when the photographer wanted to take a few more pictures of me alone, the rolling of his eyes when the DJ asked us to dance together again. At one point I heard someone in the background say something to the effect of, “It looks like Christi’s initiating all the kissing.” I was humiliated. What I had refused to acknowledge before was now right there on tape as evidence, and I couldn’t ignore it.

  At the beginning of our relationship I wrote off this impatience as simply Justin’s personality. That’s how he handled a lot of things in his life . . . with eye rolling and a lot of huffing and puffing. But as the years went by, I had to acknowledge that maybe, in his heart of hearts, he didn’t want this marriage after all. Maybe he only wanted me with him because he didn’t want to be alone. Maybe he had his own insecurities to deal with. Maybe he wasn’t ready to get married. Whatever the reason, I hurt for both of us.

  I can’t tell you how many times over the next five years I looked back on that day and asked myself, Where was I? I was strong! I was smart! I was independent! What alien took over my head and my heart, telling me, Yeah, walk down that aisle. Marry that guy! That’s what you should do?

  I knew when all was said and done, it wasn’t only Justin’s fault that we’d gotten married. I had made this choice. I’d said yes; I’d walked down the aisle; I’d spoken the words I do. And I’d lied to myself about it the whole time. I suppose I wanted to marry him so much that I allowed that desire to override all the trepidations and doubts I had.

  But it took me a long time to own my part in it. What’s important is that I finally did. Because until you acknowledge your contribution to a broken situation, you can’t truly start to fix it.

  There was a landfill full of rubbish I had to wade through before I was honest enough with myself to start making some sound decisions, though. Before I could find my way back to the real me—the person God had created me to be. At one point, it all literally brought me to my knees.

  But on the night of my wedding, I laid my head down on a pillow, closed my eyes, and prayed, “God, be with us.” Quite frankly, I didn’t have any other words.

  Chapter 2

  When You Lose, Don’t Lose the Lesson

  I met Justin at my first television job. We were co-anchors in a tiny market in West Virginia—market size 161 out of 210 in the country at the time. Everyone there was a one-man band, meaning we wore every hat imaginable. Reporter, anchor, photographer, editor.

  The days were grueling—I’d lug camera equipment through every inclement weather pattern, then scramble to set up the tripod and get the video I needed while simultaneously scouting out the scene to identify (and catch) the people I needed for a sound bite. Since I didn’t have any experience in editing, it took me a while to get the hang of it . . . much to the delight of a couple of the girls at the station who knew a lot more than I did. They didn’t hesitate to make fun of me—sometimes behind my back and other times right in front of my face. On the worst days, it worked. I felt completely inadequate.

  There I was, starting out in television at twenty-six years old—a dinosaur in this business! Most of my colleagues were fresh out of college. But on some level I knew this opportunity had come to me for a reason. I knew I had to grab it with both hands and run with it. And so, as the weeks wore on, I dug in my heels and started getting the hang of things. It was a good lesson for me in putting myself out there at the risk of criticism, in sifting through what other people thought of me and holding it up against what I knew to be true about myself. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be my final lesson in that arena.

  As much as I would have hesitated to admit it at the time, the small-market experience was a blessing because it taught me to appreciate every position that goes into pulling off a newscast. I learned that it’s not about one person—no one can do it alone. It takes a team to put together great stories and impactful newscasts. I’m grateful to have always been surrounded by good teams, starting with that first position in West Virginia. I learned from a group of talented people and was able to be part of some work we were all proud of.

  But let’s be honest—starting in market size 161 is no one’s ideal. I was young and, quite frankly, naive. Although I’d spent a summer in Los Angeles for an internship with Entertainment Tonight and had lived on my own in Cleveland for a couple of years, there was something about this move to West Virginia that felt jarring. Unsettling. I’d left a decent position in Cleveland as tourism manager of the Convention and Visitors Bureau to take this job, and it was scary. Sure, I was excited about the change, but it felt like a huge lifestyle shift—moving from the hustle and bustle of the city to the quiet hills of no-man’s-land. I found myself in a newsroom that seemed terribly primitive to me—we were still typing on typewriters, and we had to tape scripts together and feed them through a projector for the prompter. On top of it all, I didn’t know a soul for a one-hundred-mile radius.

  I was truly alone.

  I found myself asking, What if I don’t make it? What if I stink at this? If I can’t do it, what’s next?

  Yeah, insecurity is a pain.

  At night I’d lie in bed trying to fall asleep, remembering the look on my mom’s face when my parents left me here. After helping move me into my apartment, my parents took me to dinner. I could tell Mom was as anxious as I was. I think we both knew this was a good thing—something I had to do if I was ever going to get to my dream job, which at the time was to be the morning and noon anchor at the NBC affiliate in Cleveland. I remember leaving the parking lot of the restaurant going one way while they turned the other, all the while watching in our rearview mirrors. Once their car disappeared over the horizon, I cried. No, I sobbed. Like a two-year-old. This seemed like the craziest move I’d ever made.

  The news business—especially for someone who’s just starting out—is brutal on several levels. For one thing, the competition is fierce. Number two, one-man-band work is exhausting and stressful because there’s always a deadline looming. And three, you’re sure not going to get rich in those early years.

  I did my best to settle in and to focus on doing a good job and learning the ropes so I could eventually move on. I wasn’t alone in that goal. All of us at the station were as poor as church mice—most of us had a starting salary of $12,000 a year. Yes, you read that right. No numbers are transposed. Twelve. Thousand. Dollars. That meant some of us were living in parts of town that weren’t exactly safe.

  One evening I remember the sports guy, Jon, calling to warn me he’d just heard over the scanner that there was a prison escapee alleged to be somewhere in the apartment complex where I lived. The police were on their way, he said. I locked my door and later heard some commotion nearby. They go
t him.

  Our newscast covered topics like city council meetings, local festivals, and the hunting season. There were some perks, though, and those usually came in the form of the people we got to know. Small communities are loyal communities, and the people of Clarksburg were incredibly kind to us. I remember one councilman who would sit through tedious meetings trying to distract me by throwing wads of paper at me or tossing candy to me as the meeting crawled to an end. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who thought the meetings were hopelessly boring.

  There was another plus to starting in a small market: when you make mistakes—and you will make mistakes—the whole world doesn’t see them. (Unless, of course, it gets posted on YouTube, but that came after my small-market time.)

  When we first met, Justin seemed larger than life. Granted, he did have a bit of a temper, but he was charismatic and charming and had so much ambition. He was intensely driven, and I was taken with that . . . drawn to it, even. And while he might not have been patient, he did seem to enjoy taking care of me. That made me feel loved. One night, after I’d gotten sick and couldn’t go to work, he called me, just to see how I was doing. Another time, when he knew I was out on a late-breaking story, he came back to the station well after midnight. He saw the lights on at the station, he said, and he wanted to make sure I’d gotten back okay. Yes, Justin had a wonderfully caring side to him.

  And I was in a very vulnerable place when I fell into his life.

  Far away from my friends and family and still trying to get acclimated to a new place just five months after moving, I was feeling alone and insecure. And things were about to get much worse.

  In the early morning hours of Valentine’s Day, my phone rang. It was Mom. She started by saying, “Christi, something awful has happened. But I want you to know your dad and I and Danny and the grandmas are all okay.” Even as my mind was whirling, I thought about how brilliant she was to instantly halt my visions of something horrible happening to the people I cared for most. She knew me well, and she knew that was where my mind would go first.

  “P.A. is in the hospital. He tried to kill himself.”

  Everything went still as I tried to process what she was saying. I tried to say something, but no words came out.

  P.A. was my brother’s best friend and basically part of our family. He and Danny had been inseparable throughout high school, and he was even my little brother in our high school production of The Sound of Music. I played Liesl and he was Friedrich, so we always joked that he really was my second little brother.

  “What happened?” I finally got out.

  “We don’t know why it happened, honey.” Mom went on to say that late the night before, he called Danny, who was three hours away at college. P.A. told him he couldn’t take it anymore. Danny tried to talk to him, to plead with him. But in the end, P.A. simply said, “I love you, man. Fade to black.” And he hung up.

  After frantic calls from my brother to my mom and P.A.’s family, they heard that a police officer had found P.A. sitting in his car in the high school parking lot. The officer had his lights shining toward him and spent some time talking to him from a distance, trying to get him to think about what he was doing. The officer later told us he saw P.A. lean his seat way back, and then the rear window of the car simply exploded. He’d shot himself.

  But P.A. wasn’t dead. He was in the hospital in Toledo. Mom said they didn’t know how much time he might have, so I knew I had to get to him right away. How could he have been so desperate that he thought this was the only way out?

  I got dressed, went to work, and walked straight to my news director. “I can stay and do the show tonight,” I said, “but then I have to go home.”

  Here’s the thing—it was February sweeps. Anyone in news knows how crucial that time is, especially for the main anchors. I knew there was a possibility my director would say, “If you leave, don’t bother coming back.” I’d only been there five months, after all. But there was no question in my mind. I was determined to be home—either to support my brother if P.A. woke up or to say good-bye to P.A. if he didn’t.

  I’d already lost one friend without having a chance to say good-bye. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

  Four years before this call about P.A., my friend Melissa was murdered.

  The afternoon before Melissa died, I was sitting at home watching the snow fall, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to get in touch with her. I just had this sense that she was having trouble with a guy she was newly dating. I picked up the receiver at least half a dozen times to contact her, but I never made the call. I was trying to be sensitive, I guess, thinking if she needed me she’d let me know.

  I wish I’d listened to that nagging feeling and called her. I didn’t know it then, but it would have been our last conversation.

  The next evening a mutual friend called to tell me Melissa was missing.

  I called Melissa’s apartment as soon as I woke up the next morning. I didn’t recognize the voice that answered, but I asked if Melissa was there. There was a pause, followed by the words I will never forget: “Melissa is dead.”

  I felt all the air being squeezed out of my lungs. Then the questions started charging in my head, one after the other: What happened? Where was she? Was it an accident? And the one that sticks around the longest: Why?

  I slumped onto the couch and buried my head in my hands. Finally, after about an hour, I was able to get a grip on myself enough to turn on the television. Melissa’s story was splashed across every news station from Toledo to Cleveland. She had been shot. There was no suspect . . . yet.

  In the days that followed, answers started to permeate the fog. Someone had made a call to the police early in the morning, claiming there had been gunshots in a campus parking lot. A witness had allegedly seen a taxi pull away from the area where her body was ultimately found. By the end of the week, campus police officer Jeffrey Hodge was in custody and had admitted to pulling Melissa over, handcuffing her, and eventually shooting her fourteen times. Fourteen times.

  Hodge pleaded guilty and is now serving a life sentence.

  If someone had asked me then what I wanted, I would have said justice. I wanted this guy to pay for his crime, to get what he had coming. It’s part of human nature, I suppose. But looking deeper, I guess what I really wanted were answers. It seemed unfair not only that Melissa was taken away from us but also that we didn’t know why. I firmly believe in heaven and in God, but in all honesty, when someone is snatched away so violently and abruptly, it’s hard to accept that she’s in a better place.

  I knew Melissa was no longer suffering, and for that I was grateful. But those of us who remained behind were still haunted by the images that played over and over in our minds.

  I tried to keep reminding myself that Melissa’s pain was over.

  Melissa’s death was a defining moment for me in more ways than one. It was through that experience that I learned to look for the lessons.

  “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” I’d heard this expression before, but somehow it wasn’t until tragedy struck that it really sank in. This was no longer just a nice saying; it was true. Everything we experience—every loss, every torment, every numbing pain—has something to teach us. Something that will make us stronger and wiser. But we spend so much energy attempting to outrun our agony that we don’t take the time to figure out what God is trying to reveal to us through it.

  It took time, but eventually I gleaned two profound lessons from losing Melissa.

  Number one: asking why was useless. I’d been on my knees countless times, pleading with God, “Why did You do this? Why did You allow this? Why didn’t You save her?”

  There came a day when I finally accepted that those questions were irrelevant. I envisioned sitting with God and asking Him, for the hundredth time, why He hadn’t intervened and stopped the bullets. Or brought someone to her rescue. Or kept her away from there in the first place.

  As t
hat image of my dialogue with God played in my head, I suddenly realized something: He would never have an answer for me because at the end of the day, there was nothing He could say that I would be able to accept on human terms.

  And being angry about it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I eventually had to learn to trust God in all things, even when they didn’t make sense to me. Even in those moments that contorted my mind and challenged every ounce of faith I had. Even in the baffling mystery, the heartbreaking loss, the stifling loneliness.

  There are certain things we will never know the answers to in this life. Period.

  And somehow, by the grace of God, we have to learn to be okay with that. Life is too short to allow toxic bitterness to make its home in our hearts, gradually eating away chunks of what makes us, well . . . us.

  So what I learned in the wake of Melissa’s death was that I had a choice: I could choose to be ticked off, or I could choose to trust God. Yeah. It’s a choice.

  Lesson number two: there’s a reason for me. And there’s a reason for you, too. There’s a reason we’re still breathing and talking and waking up in the morning. There’s a purpose for our words, a destination for our dreams, and an intention for our ambitions. All these things are part of who God made each of us to be.

  This world needs you. Even if you may not know why at the moment.

  Circumstances are some of the biggest liars of this world. When trauma strikes—when our bodies become ill or our relationships start to disintegrate or a friend betrays us—we wonder if there is still a purpose for us. We confuse the situations we’ve been handed as indications of how much—or how little—God loves us. But one doesn’t equate with the other.